Its awfully enjoyable...the main differences with a turtle pond a fish pond is that (unless you have a VERY well fenced in yard) you have to build a small fence around the pond to keep the turtles from leaving. You also have to take into account that turtles aren't the most gentle of animals on your plants - so you'll really have to pack a lot of plants in there to keep your pond looking nice. A lot of the commonly available turtles are highly omnivorous and will just tear apart any of the plants you put in there. Redear sliders (Trachemys scripta) and Painted Turtles (Chrysemys picta) are the ones most commonly sold (and the cheapest) and they both love to snip water lilies off...but if you've got enough you can make a very nice pond. I'll include a photo of an old pond I had that housed some painted turtles and a slider - the key to keeping the pond looking nice is to keep small numbers of turtles in there. My old pond was around 2500 gallons and it only had 3 turtles in there...to give you an idea.

Glenda, I would be suspicious of your "little brown banty"...my hens LOVE cabbages and eat the tops out of them. They also love tomatoes and are known to steal strawberries, too. They beat me to ALL the strawberries this year. :) I grew ten cabbages - we will consume only two (in a year) unless I make Sauerkraut (sourkraut), so I "allowed" them to eat two or three and they left the others alone. That does not always work. Sometimes they take bites out of every one they find. Depends on the number of chickens I have. When the flock is large, only fencing them out will solve the problem. In gangs, they become total punks! Of course, I shoo them out every time I see them chomping on the cabbage - you can't let the kids know you are not in complete control of things - so those two cabbages became their forbidden fruit. I give them everything I clean out of the garden. I toss it is their run and they compost it for me. :) Now, there are various schools of thought on whether to allow chickens to eat stuff from the garden or not. One thought is that if you give them a tomato they develop a taste for them and will be more likely to rob your garden. Another thought, (mine) is that foods that are within their dietary range are going to be fair game regardless of whether they have ever tasted one from your garden or not. They crave what they need, just like every other species on this planet, including us. (we of course are the ONLY species that consumes things that are deadly and/or makes us sick - and obviously the superior species on this planet. Uh hum! Anyway, I bet your little thief is your Banty chicken. During drought, wild birds will eat tomatoes too, but with the cabbage, I would venture to guess that it is your chicken. Tomato cages (the round wire basket-type) with extra netting or chicken wire added around the bottom will help. They work for cabbages too. (wink wink) schoolhouse, I had a black lab years ago, named Little Elmo (MoMo for short). One summer, he took it upon himself to collect Box Turtles. We ended up with well over fifty box turtles that Elmo brought home to me. THAT is a story in itself: "The Adventures of Little Elmo and the Box Turtles". What a cute dog! He was the same dog that some of you might recall me telling you about who as a pup had a pink puppy pacifier tied to his collar. We fed the turtles soggy dog food and June bugs and lettuce from the garden and of course tomatoes or whatever was on the turtle menu for the day. I built them a pen in an old bottomless swimming pool frame over the builder's sand pile left from the construction of my house. In the sand, I built a sunken drinking pool (a shallow plate) so they had access to water. They would dig down in the sand or climb to the top and look around, blinking. My kids watched them for hours, laughing and laughing. One half of the pen was on solid ground and there was grass, too. It was partially in filtered shade all day. The kids and I (and "itto MoMo") watched them for about a month and then we released them back into the wild. Some stayed around but most went back to their natal habitats. We learned a lot about Box Turtles in that month. I raised my children back in the day to observe, enjoy and protect all wildlife. They still do... OBTW - We also discovered that Box Turtles love peaches... ~Annie "Blow up your TV, throw away your paper; Go to the country, build you a home. Plant a little garden, eat a lot of peaches; Try an find Jesus, on your own." "(I) blew up our TV; threw away our paper; Went to the country, built (me) a home. Had a lot of children, fed 'em on peaches. They all found Jesus, on their own." - John Prine

The aquatic plants you mentioned need very high light but would do well if you can provide it. Turtles would do best with floating plants because they will up-root anything that is planted. You could also use any aquatic plants from the aquarium store, java moss and java fern look great mounted on a submerged piece of wood. I would try a few plants first because most turtle keepers go for purely functional tanks because the turtles really mess things up. You would not want to spend money on a bunch of new plants just to have them killed off. If the turtles are still small you could use a planted tank but later in life they will be better suited to a plain setup.

Hard to tell from that view, but it looks like a Texas River Cooter (Pseudemys texana). Let it go in a nearby river or pond.